Byte Rights: Think of the Children, But Not Too Carefully

Apparently, I am an Internet child-raping fiend. How else could I be against something called the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act? It's even supported by sheriffs associations and the Department of Justice, among others, and your representative may be voting on it soon (hint, hint).

Turns out, what's at issue here has nothing to do with children and sex—in fact, it would be particularly hard to find a child pornographer with this law. It's a callous way of making anyone concerned about online freedom sound like a slavering pervert, an old trick of over-the-top lawmakers. The naming of the act is often inverse to how horrible it is. If they wanted to dump toxins in the water supply, they'd call it the Save Kittens Act and claim the opposition were cat-hating Hitlers.

What the law is really about is data retention. Data retention policies mandate that ISPs keep data on all their customers for some predetermined time (usually around a year), in case the police pop by and want to look at someone's records. Of course, the problem is that if you know you're going to be committing a crime, you just go somewhere exempt from data retention like a library or coffee shop. As a tool for catching hardened criminals, this is less than useless. But for snooping on people who might file-share or coordinate a protest, it's perfect. The data they want gathered isn't just your temporary IP at all times, it's also your name, address, phone number, credit card, and bank account.

I don't actually want to allege that the government wants to spy on its citizens by looking for any shade of gray or dissent online, but acts like these make it hard not to wonder.

Comments

The legal pornography industry could be completely moved our newly introduced .xxx domain to further stop illegal online activity. Internet serivce providers already log everything you do. Which is ok when you're not breaking the law. It allows legit authorities to catch real criminals. The ability for companies to log and use your personal data however they want is another story.

another interesting tidbit about this law is that it relaxes the right to gather information on the children too. currently it is pretty restrictive- but the new law states that ISP's need to collect and maintain the information in order to delete it later- so this way they can track children where the current law is against that.- good for marketing

another interesting tidbit about this law is that it relaxes the right to gather information on the children too. currently it is pretty restrictive- but the new law states that ISP's need to collect and maintain the information in order to delete it later- so this way they can track children where the current law is against that.- good for marketing

"I don't actually want to allege that the government wants to spy on its citizens by looking for any shade of gray or dissent online, but acts like these make it hard not to wonder."

Wink/nudge? Because they sure as hell are. The head of the CIA has said that Google search terms and Facebook among others are mined all the time for this exact reason. The white house said the exact same thing as well.

You really didn't need to make up the "Save Kittens Act" to make your point. You could have just cited actual laws like "Healthy Forest" and "Clear Skies". Healthy Forest, signed by Dubya, opened up forests for more logging while Clear Skies was said to "clear the sky... of birds." Clear Skies, also signed by Dubya, allowed more air pollution.

It's pretty slimy the way these politicians work. We're overrun by lobbyists, and people are barely paying attention to what's happening. They use dirty tactics like this to further confuse and turn people off to participating. It's so much easier and less frustrating to simply ignore what's going on in our name. Ignorance sure is bliss in the short term, but really comes and bites you back in the long run.